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Another year is closing and a new one is on the way. The start of every new year is filled with planning and goals for the next 365 days that follow. It's not any different for me. I have some crazy resolutions for the next 12 months, and I believe 2010 will be a creative year. One for the books.
I was reading some articles online. One in particular was a really interesting post by Mike Kuz (one of my favorite designers) for 24ways.org called a New Year’s resolution, where he talks about trying more and not limiting yourself to the web when designing for the web.
“A key factor in creating something original and fresh for the web is to stop thinking in terms of web design. The first thing we need to do is forget the notion of headers, footers, side bars etc. A website doesn’t necessarily need any of these, so even before we’ve started we’ve already limited our design possibilities by thinking in these very conventional and generally accepted web terms.” - Mike Kuz
Besides reading articles I love listening to podcasts when I’m running. I've listened to some really great ones, but there's two in particular that I want to mention. The first is from the IA Summit 09 called Creating Magic Kingdoms: User Experience Lessons from Disney’s Imagineers by Mike Atherton.
Mike talks about passion when doing something and how that helps us to achieve our goals. He uses Disney and their engineers or as he calls them- "Imagineers" as an example. It’s very motivating with great insights about the importance of trying and believing in what you’re doing.
“Our greatest asset was ignorance. We didn’t know we could fail” - Marty Sklar, Imagineer.
You can see the slides and listen to the podcast below.
The second podcast that I found useful was a great episode from the SpoolCast, podcast from the UIE.com by the mighty Jared Spool, called Innovation Beyond the Buzzword. It was an interview with Scott Berkun and he talked about the meaning of the word innovation and how we can bring it into our projects.
The part that I enjoyed the most was the discussion about how to be creative. He says that everyone is creative but somehow we deny that because it is something very particular of each person, there’s no right or wrong, but instead only points of views. We simply don’t want to expose ourselves or get into discussions or arguments about our thoughts and we end up choosing the logic fields like math or science where there’s one right answer.
“True innovation starts with you allowing yourself to be creative and recording your ideas religiously in a safe place like a notebook or sketchpad. Don’t self-censor, either. Initial precision and “getting it right” are the antithesis of creativity. It’s essential to let the ideas flow, and your ideas will improve as you continue to record them. Your journal is an incubator of ideas. Not every idea will be a success, and some will be terrible! But Scott says that’s OK. When an opportunity for change arises, you’ll have a treasure trove of ideas to pick though.”
They go on to talk about the importance of group trust when you have an idea because that's what's necessary in making the idea come true. This leads to one of the most important topics for us designers that is how to provide useful feedback, or honest and constructive criticism among teams and individuals.
“Good critiques take practice and trust within your team. This usually requires time and commitment.” - Scott Berkun
I highly recommend that you listen to this episode. You can do so below
Great design by Glennz, one of the most creative t-shirt designers out there. Glennz simply plays and tries different concepts for well known things like this one.
When I said in the beginning of the text that 2010 would be a creative year I meant that the best way to be creative is practicing and exercising creativity. There was a time where I believed that good ideas would come out of the blue. I later found out that there's always a lot of thought involved. Nobody simply comes up with a good idea if there's not a problem to solve, a question to ask, or a desire to fulfill.
I want to propose that we all make 2010 a great and creative year by sharing our knowledge and not being afraid of experimenting. Let’s be less critical about the outcome of our experiments and more cheerful about our discoveries in the learning process and the evolution path in the design skills. That's what's most important after all.

Back in 2006, end of November to be exact, my design studio was robbed and as you guys might already know the story, I lost my computer and my backup drives with all my files and endeavors in the design field... A long time has passed since then-- 3 years to this date, and today we can fortunately celebrate the day that I lost everything but gained even more in return.
Because of the robbery I created Abduzeedo, and what started as a simple means of backup turned into what is today my main job. The most important thing though is that I got the chance to meet up and interact with so many fascinating people, first with the guys who became contributors and now with of course all of you guys who read the blog everyday.
We love design. We're crazy about it. Eat, sleep, and breathe it. I guess a less cheesy way to put it would be that we're big design enthusiasts over here at Abduzeedo. We believe in good design and we've been doing our best to come up with inspiring posts for you guys every day. In turn, that constant search for inspiration has given us the chance to discover new and incredibly talented artists and designers. And because of that, we thank you all for these three amazing years.
We're going all out and making a big party out of this, and we want to personally extend the invitation to all you guys. Join us in spreading design cheer around the world! We figured there's no better way to party and thank you guys more (and kick-off the holiday season!) than to giveaway some amazing gifts. A very special thanks to James White, Vitaly Friedman, Ryan Cash, Simonas Bastys, Andrew Follett, Simon Page, and our sponsors for all their kindness in helping us make this happen!
Gifts
1 Apple Macbook - http://www.apple.com/macbook/ *
2.26GHz : 250GB, 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 memory, 250GB hard drive1, 8x double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, Built-in 7-hour battery2, Polycarbonate unibody enclosure
3 Smashingmagazine books http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.
For more information about Smashingmagazine visit http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
3 James White Posters - http://blog.signalnoise.com
James White has been drawing since the age of 4, scribbling down his favorite characters such as Superman, Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc. Being from a military family, he made 3 big moves through childhood but never strayed from his colored-pencils.
Today, James creates personal posters and art prints for sale on his website, Signalnoise.com, while working with select clients looking to add new creative to their campaigns. He has worked with such clients as Toyota, Armada Skis, VH1 Latin America and MTV, and has been featured internationally in Computer Arts andAdvanced Photoshop magazines.
For more information about James White visit: http://blog.signalnoise.com
3 Billings Copies - http://www.billingsapp.com/
Billings is an excellent example of a highly usable localized application, designed specifically for Mac OS X and small business users. Billings is designed to manage time-tracking and expenses for small business users and produce gorgeous invoices. Billings is built on Cocoa, and integrates with Mail, Google Maps, and iCal. It supports F-Script for invoice design, produces cross-platform PDF invoices using Quartz, and leverages the Address Book framework. Billings is localized in English, French, German, Japanese and Dutch. A companion iPhone app is on the way.
For more information about Billings visit: http://www.billingsapp.com/
3 Copies of Pixelmator - http://www.pixelmator.com/
Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.
For more information about Pixelmator visit http://www.pixelmator.com/
3 Premium Accounts at ConceptFeedback - http://www.conceptfeedback.com/
Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts
For more information about ConceptFeedback visit: http://www.conceptfeedback.com/
2 International Year of Astronomy 2009 Posters - http://www.astronomy2009.org/
"I initially designed these as self-promotional works but word gets around and last week I received an email from the IYA 09 that they thought the posters were great and would like to use them for their promotional work - this was awesome and I of course said yes." Simon Page
For more information about the International Year of Astronomy visit http://www.astronomy2009.org/ and to see the posters check out this post.
3 Abduzeedo t-shirts - http://abdutees.bigcartel.com/
"Goddess of Abduction" is the first tee for the Abductees Limited Edition Series designed by Draco. The shirt is printed on American Appeal color black, if you have any doubt about your size please check Guys Size Chart and Girls Size Chart
1 PSD to XHTML Conversion by shopHTML
ShopHTML is a team of XHTML/CSS specialists that have provided conversion services and expertise in XHTML/CSS, Wordpress, and Joomla for the past 5 years. The services guarantee (or full refund is issued) w3C validated code for XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS validation which is tested across Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, Safari 3/4, and Opera 9. — and they do all of this in a 24 hour turnaround time without compromising quality.
For more information about shopHTML visit http://shophtml.com
Rules
The rules are simple. Our goal is to promote and share design related links (photography, illustration, product design, graphic design, 3d...), so to be in the running for the prizes all you have to do is:
1 - Leave a comment here on this post with the title of the design link you are sharing and you believe it's really cool.
2 - Follow Abduzeedo on twitter - http://twitter.com/abduzeedo
3 - Share the link with the title on Twitter using the hashtag #design at the end.
Example: "50 Beautiful Free Icon Sets For Your Next Design: http://bit.ly/7A3ruO #design
You can leave as many comments you want, but you will have to tweet them as well.
Winners
The winners will be selected at random and the last one to be selected will be the Macbook winner. Of course we'll also check out the shared link to determine whether it's valuable to the design community or not.
We will announce the winners on December 24th, so start looking for good design links to share and let's get abducted by design!
*The winner of the Macbook will be responsible for the taxes and other legal fees. The product will be sent from the US.

After almost a year, we have a new design! As web designers we’re always thinking about what to change in order to make the site more friendly for those who are looking for inspiration and tutorials.
Our main goal was to simplify the design and also add more white-space. The images of the articles have and always will be the main asset of the blog so we wanted to drive the user’s attention to the images and text, and less to the interface itself. That’s why we have removed the stars on the header but still kept them on the footer. Also we were very inspired by magazine designs, that explains the text overlapping the images.
New Features
Among the main changes on the new design we could list:
Bigger images
Preview image at the top of the articles
More white-space
Thumbnail view on the home-page
Threaded conversations on the comments
CSS 3 for effects (sorry IE users)
Big preview image with text overlapping
Thumbnails view
Reply to comments
Navigation
In terms of navigation, we split the menu in two. The main menu consists of the most important categories on the blog:
Tutorials
Photoshop
Illustrator
Pixelmator
Fireworks
Quick Tips
Case Studies
InspirationArchitecture
Illustration
Photography
Daily Inspiration
Sites of the Week
Best of the Week
Popular Post
Wallpapers
Inspiration
Meebo Bar
Another great feature we added (and that we're really excited about!) is the Meebo Bar! The Meebo Bar allows you to drag and share any images of the site via Twitter, Facebook or email. Also we will be able to chat while navigating on Abduzeedo. That way we might even be able to help you guys on tutorials or any questions you might have regarding posts and so on.
Meebo Bar
It doesn't just stop there. Abduzeedo is always under development. We try to learn as much as we can from you and we’re always open to suggestions. Our idea is always to make the experience as better and simpler as possible. We still have some features up our sleeves that will be released very soon! One thing I can reveal right now is that our iPhone app is 95% done ;)
iPhone app is coming
Also we want to mention and thank our hosting (mt) Media Temple for the great support during the redesign process, we were working with the 2 versions and sometimes doing crazy things but they guys over at Media Temple kept Abduzeedo up and running.

Inspire me, now is a little inspiration blog created by Szymon Blaszczyk that I have been following for a while now and every time I go to check it out I am sure to be inspired with some great stuff. So I decided to share with you guys some great and crazy inspiration.
Make sure to visit Inspire me, now!

Everyone tries to be different when creating their own website where their portfolio will be displayed, and lately it seem that more and more people have been choosing to have a little blog together with their portfolio. The trend of blogging got to designers and artists and here are some great samples of it.
Having a blog on your portfolio website can help in many ways, you can use it just as a 'news' so every time you want to let your visitors know about something you have that little blog there to tell them, you can use it as just a simple blog to share your thoughts with your visitor, or even go further and boost up the blog content to attract people that will fortunately end up looking at your portfolio.
No matter what reason fits you, it's always a good option to have it. Here are some good samples with really good use of it. Enjoy!
Douglas Menezes
http://douglasmenezes.com
James A. Mathias
http://leihu.com
Rockatee
http://rockatee.com
Ond?ej Ve?tát
http://www.ondrejvertat.cz
J. Pedro Ribeiro
http://jpedroribeiro.com
Snoop
http://snopp.no
Husani
http://www.husani.com
Tylor J. Reimer
http://www.tylorjreimer.com
Noe
http://www.noedesign.com
Gil de los Santos
http://yosoygil.com/

Every day I go through a lot of blogs and I always try to notice and understand why they display their post the way they do, so I decided to share with you guys by selecting a couple good blogs and talk about how they display their posts on the main page.
Well, surfing on the web you can find thousands of blogs about everything and most of them will have different designs and different ways to display their posts on the main page, this is what we are going to talk about on this post.
The most important thing about blogs and what make them be a good or not it's the blog's content, independent of it's look and style the blog content is definitely the main thing on a blog, even if you got the best looking blog on earth and don't have a good content there is no way your blog will succeed.
You may think it's not but the way the posts are displayed on the front page can set you blog from being successful or not. You have to adapt the way you display your content to a couple things so you can fit the design and structure to it's content.
I know there should be at least a little bit of study behind that for each blog, but sometimes it doesn't happen that way. I'm going to be showing a couple samples and talk about it so we can get a better knowledge about it.
The things you see in most on the blogs when displaying their post is:
(It does not always come in this order)
Post Title
Post Description
Thumbnail
Date
Author
Tags
Category
Comments
Read More
These are the most common things you see on a post display and I think it's good to have it all but in the right way depending on your needs, let's see how others do so we can get a good idea, I selected 3 big blogs that most of us know to show how they work.
SmashingMagazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
As most of us know, this is a blog that has very useful and innovative information for designers and Web developers and it's very interesting the way they display their post, very different from most blogs.
SmashingMagazine have very big and complex posts, because of that they don't post many times a day like a lot of blogs do, but I would say they post around 7 times a week and the way they display each post on the main page is very important, the index fit's 8 posts so if you come to the blog one time a week you are able to see everything they posted for that week without having to look any further.
Because of the fact that they don't post all the time they make each post very known on the main page by using a very big way to display what they have, I would say that's a very smart move and it fits their need very well.
They use a big title with the color green, a color there can't be seen anywhere else in the blog because that way when you see the big green letters what comes to your mind is that a new post is starting, and also is very well used to drive the readers attention to the post which is great.
To follow that they have a very simple line that starts with a little icon to represent time and date and also has in light color text the name of the author, the date of the post, a link for the category and the number of comments. Notice that the category link has a lighter color than the usual links of the blog.
After that comes a big description of the post where they use bold font to highlight the main words of the description since they have such a big post description, their thumbnail comes in between the description and it's always very direct, it doesn't take the whole width space and it comes in different sizes depending on the posts.
To finish up a read more link (notice that if you click on the title or on the thumb it will also take you to the post)
When the main element of a post it is the written content, the post description plays a big part and a lot of times it's even the begging of the written post, focused on that you need a nicely written description and remember that the post title is even more important because people want to know what they reading about. Also remember to put a thumb that doesn't take a lot of attention because thumbs attract eyes and clicks to see the full post.
Fubiz
http://fubiz.net/
Fubiz is a french blog that brings great design inspiration and has a very elegant way to display their posts.
Fubiz has a simple but very elegant way to display their posts, it's a very busy blog with an average of 16 posts a week and it's main page fit's 12 posts.
The posts start with the title in a darker text color than the rest of it and to help drive some attention it comes with a little vertical pink bar just enough to put you eyes in the right place to start reading the post.
The title is followed by a small post description with light color text because the blog content is mostly images so the description is there but doesn't really need to be read. The thumbnail is the most important thing on their post, it takes the whole width and vary on the height. Having a good thumb up front is a big step for having a successful post.
After that comes a link to read more, but you can also go to the post page by clicking on the title or the thumb.
To finish up they display their tags highlighted and it's also a link for that tag, and a simple line starting with a icon that represents date and time followed by the author, and the date of the post. Their post has one extra thing that shoes how many votes their post have represented by a heart and the number of votes.
On the right bottom part you can see an icon with the number of comments which make that stand out a little and maybe encourage people to read more and go on to the post page by the number of comments.
For a inspiration website the main focus is the inspiration which are the images. That makes the thumbnail the main element on the posts so it's good to get a decent size thumb.
PSD Tuts
http://psd.tutsplus.com/
PSD Tuts is a very well known tutorial blog that post the best of photoshop tuts.
The way they display their post is very cool, everything is always the same changing only the content. They post an average of 7 times a week and their main page fits 10 posts.
What comes first on their post is a 200x200 pixels thumbnail on the left side and all the rest of the post info comes on the right side.
Continuing on the right side we have a big post title with darker color and also big comment icon with the number of comments, I think if the blogs get a lot of comments it's good to show off the way they do, it also helps attract more readers,
Under the title comes the line with the date, category, and author's name. I don't like the way this line has a red background because it takes a lot of attention and it's not the main thing that people look forward to see.
Following that is a short description of the post in light color text and italic font, it comes out to be the most simple thing about the post. To finish up a Continue Reading link that is placed on the end and stands out after the light text description which is good.
When it comes to tutorials, most people tend to see the title and the thumb because they want to see what is the tutorial all about and what the result looks like, very important to focus on these two elements
More Samples
Conclusion
The main goal of a blog is to have it's posts viewed as many times as possible, and to make their posts very famous you have to make the very best display of each post. The blog content should play a good role on how you are going to display the posts on your blog.
Hope this was useful information, I want to start writing more about this stuff and if you would like to hear more make you comment, any questions and suggestions are more than welcome.
Thank you,

Blog designs is something I really enjoy seeing and designing as well, I remember not too long ago when most of the blogs where pretty much the same with the same structure and changing only colors, check out how they look now.
This is a series I want to continue every now and then to create a good inspirations for all the bloggers and web designers we got here.
As I was saying that not to long ago the blogs where pretty much the same, has totally changed, not only the design but the structures of a blog can be anyway you can Imagine, and that's also something that amazes me. So look out for that and enjoy the selection.
http://www.jor-on.com/blog/
http://robgoodlatte.com/
http://mattbrett.com/
http://bienbienbien.net/
http://octwelve.com/
http://www.monofactor.com/
http://www.photoshoplady.com/
http://paulenderson.com/
http://blog.razvanstavila.com/
http://www.daleanthony.com/
http://blog.criticalwebdesign.co.uk/
http://www.noventilador.com.br/
http://leslyg.com/
http://bigsweaterdesign.com/blog/
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
http://www.jrvelasco.com/
http://artgeex.com/v6/
http://malenehald.dk/blog/
http://www.larissameek.com/
http://www.okapistudio.com/
http://designdisease.com/
http://www.pixele.fr/
http://reformrevolution.com/
http://www.kineda.com/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
http://webdesignledger.com/
http://acko.net/
http://www.gomediazine.com/
http://hi.pirajafisken.net/
http://www.made-in-england.org/
http://www.macalicious.com/
http://www.mattbernstein.co.uk/
http://www.style4you.it/
http://aditshukla.com/
http://www.filmschool.ph/blogger/
http://www.antiphrasis.com/
http://www.basmatitree.net/
http://www.homedesignfind.com/
http://pointlessramblings.com/
http://www.dollarshort.org/
http://www.pienternet.be/
http://agamicreative.com/
http://www.bradruggles.com/
http://www.helsinki.fi/luova/
http://blog.6angrymen.com/
http://www.viget.com/extend/
http://www.viget.com/inspire
http://www.mrdiggles.com/
http://www.43folders.com/
http://www.peminoz.com/
If you have a cool blog, post a link and it may get on the next selection.

Abduzeedo is 2 years old already and even though the site has grown, we still receive some emails asking about the meaning of the name, and a few weeks ago we got an email asking how to pronounce it or the right way to say it. That's why we decided to write this post.
The word "abduzeedo" was created by me from the portuguese word "abduzido" that means abducted. As the name of my company is Zee, I was always trying to find some words that I could create by mixing with the word zee, such as "crazee", "deduzeendo", "ecstazee", "brazeel", and others.
Now about the pronunciation, it will change depending on the language you speak, the country you live and of course the region of the country you are from. That's why we decided that it would be nice to ask the readers how they pronounce "abduzeedo", and below you can see exactly that. Also we really want to hear you saying it, so feel free to leave comments with videos so we can see and learn how to say abduzeedo in different languages.
Fabio Sasso - Porto Alegre, Brazil http://fabiosasso.com - http://abduzeedo.com
Aloa - Hamburg, Germany
Paulo Gabriel - Abduzeedo writer - Porto Alegre, Brazil
Sanne Terpstra - The Netherlands http://www.sanneterpstra.com - http://www.twitter.com/sanneterpstra
Cameron - Los Angeles, USA http://cameronrad.com/
Marcelo e Gustavo - Porto Alegre, Brazil http://www.seferin.com.br/
Matt Smart - Bournemouth, UK http://techitch34.deviantart.com/ - http://www.muujun.co.uk/matt
LaWrEnCe.J http://www.laranz.wordpress.com/
Fabiano Meneghetti - Porto Alegre, Brazil http://fabiano.me/
Eduardo Rodrigues - Salvador-BAHIA, Brazil http://www.kornbrasil.com/
Rafael Almeida - Mogi das Cruzes - SP - Brazil
Markusm - Oslo, Norway http://www.markus-design.no/
Adam Georgiou
Tom Nussbaum - Austria/dutch http://tomlovesyou.com/
Doug Hogan - Detroit, MI / USA http://www.doughogan.com/
Michael Berg, USA http://hqubed.com/
Neill Horsman - Sydney Australia http://http://www.neillh.com.au/
Eduardo Sasso - Porto Alegre, Brazil http://eduardosasso.com/
Allison - USA http://www.keetee.com/

Abduzeedo now has a new design. It's been 6 months since the last re-design. As the blog has grown and we have more articles published every day we believed it was necessary a refresh in the UI.
We focused on how to make the articles more attractive for those that are navigating through the site, and make the older articles more accessible.
We had a few goals in mind:
Simplify
Bigger Fonts
Bigger Images
Performance
Transparent UI
Inspiration
We had some sites that really inspired us, because of their design or solutions for certain problems we that were facing as well. The Events of Carsonified was a great example of big Typography, the simple and elegant designs of Vitor Lourenco were another great inspiration, and The New York Times solution for many articles in their sites was another excellent reference, we even use the same name “inside” for a section of our new site.
Also, following some of Jason Fried's (from 37signals) advice, we didn't plan the new site in terms of sitemaps, or diagrams or even a fancy Photoshop mockup. Most of the design was done using CSS/XHTML development, such as font sizes and functionality.
Below you can see some of the sites that inspired us.
Design
Our idea was to make the UI design much simpler, without images or gradients, simply HTML text, and CSS borders and colors. Of course the Space theme had to be kept, so the header image would be practically the only image in UI of the site. That way we could drive the readers’ attention to the images of the articles, which now are much bigger.
Besides the bigger photos, the typography is much bigger too. Abduzeedo uses a dark background color scheme with grey text, and we thought a good way to make the site more friendly was by using bigger fonts, emphasizing titles and links, and using darker colors for section titles and other UI elements. We think, as they say, the content is king, and we’re trying to treat Abduzeedo’s content like that.
We also reduced the number of the thumbnails and sections. There’s now a section called Inside Abduzeedo where we use Ajax to load content on demand. This allows us to reduce the number of Database requests when loading the site. Besides that, we have a second navigation where you can check out the most important sections of the site, such as Sites of the Week, Best of the Week, Popular, Video of the Week. The same happens in the tutorial section, now the secondary navigation shows the tutorial categories: Photoshop, Illustrator, Pixelmator, Fireworks, and Others. Each one of these sections has their own RSS feed, so if you want to read only the Sites of the Week you can subscribe to a feed and receive just articles from that section.
For the colors we kept the the dark scheme, now however, we added a few more colors to our palette. Following our 80’s inspiration we chose Pink, Blue, and Yellow for links and section references, along with white and grey for texts and UI elements.
Twitter
Twitter is great and we will be using it even more. For this redesign we invited some Twitter users to test the new version before it was published, also we will start promoting new features and the most important thing will be asking for feedback. To follow us on twitter just go to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo.
New features
We have new features being developed that are really cool. We will try to release them next month so stay tuned. Also we’d like to thank you for the great response to the blog. We’re very happy because of that and it really motivates us to keep working even harder.
We’re excited with this new design, and we want to know what do you think about it. We have 2 favicon spots to give away, to win, just leave a comment with suggestions or if you find bugs let us know too.
This new release was a major update because we upgraded our CMS, with that some errors might happened, that’s why we really want to know how the site is looking and working for you. For those using Internet Explorer 6, we highly recommend you to upgrade to IE 7, we won’t support it for all features of the site.

On December 19th of 2006 I posted my very first article here, on what I would now call a website rather than just a blog. The whole idea behind Abduzeedo was that it would be my personal blog, where I could share some of my design experiments. This evolved into the tutorials we have now.
Back in 2006, when I decided to start Abduzeedo, I was going through a very difficult time in my business life... my office had been stolen and I had lost all my equipment, computer and backups. So I thought Abduzeedo would be a good way to save my "stuff" online. Then last January Fabiano and Paulo started writing articles, and a few months later Aloa joined the team.
After 2 years, I have to say, Abduzeedo has become my main activity. I have to thank you all for visiting the blog, commenting on the articles, criticizing, and helping me to evolve professionally by sharing ideas and experiments. Also I'd like to thank all the sponsors that have allowed us to keep the blog up, and of course the contributors that have posted incredible articles.
As it's time to celebrate we will do a different giveaway from what we normally do. Instead of giving the prize to a reader who leaves a comment we thought it would be nice make a sort of a scavenger hunt.
How will that work? Well, we've placed 2 images in 2 OLD Abduzeedo Articles (meaning that today's wallpaper post doesn't count). The first 2 readers who find the image will have to send a twitter message to Abduzeedo (http://twitter.com/abduzeedo) saying: "@abduzeedo Happy Birthday Abduzeedo. The image is here: link".
The image is a 2 Years Anniversary Wallpaper. The tutorial for it will be published next week.
Also, we'll give another extra shirt and a copy of Pixelmator for the best answer at twitter to the question: "Why do you love Abduzeedo?"... the answer must contain "@abduzeedo I love abduzeedo because..."
T-Shirt Design Contest Results!
We'd also like to announce the 5 winners of our T-Shirt Design Contest. It was a really cool contest, with over 70 pieces in the running for prizes! Unfortunately we had a little cheating during the votes, so design #37 was unclassified. The idea was that the voting process should be fair to anyone, and if anyone tried to make #37 win anything by cheating, you managed to screw things up. Sorry! Anyways, here are the 5 winners:
First Place!
Second Place!
Third Place
Fourth Place
Fifth Place
Congratulations to all the winners!
Geometric Book Giveaway Result!
We also want to announce the winner for another giveaway. The Kaptiza Geometric Book is all about geometric patterns inspired by basic shapes, but the best thing is that with the book you get a CD with 100 pattern fonts that you can use the way you want, allowing you to create many more different patterns. For more information about it and how to get your copy which includes the CD with 100 pattern fonts visit their site at http://kapitza.com/shop/geometric-book.
And the winner for this is: zimzallabimdesign
Editor: David Parrott

September has past. Incredibly fast in my opinion, but it was a really good month for the Blog. We have increased our traffic considerably. We started a new series of posts, the Daily Inspiration. There is the user news section. We had the contest, and some really nice giveaways. In addition, we now have an editor for some of our featured articles.
Before the news, I’d like to thank our sponsors:
activeCollab
PSD2HTML
W3<markup/>
Also, we were featured in Web Designer Magazine, and I wrote another tutorial for Digital Arts Magazine. Always nice to mention ;)
Job Board
Abduzeedo has grown from a simple design blog to a vibrant design community and a reference in design tutorials, receiving a great number of site visitors each month, and more than 10k+ RSS readers. We think that its the perfect place to find talented people in the right audience.
With that idea in mind we've built the Abduzeedo Job Board as a way to help companies to find their next "Rock Star Designer".
As a launching promotion we've set the symbolic price of just 9.99 formposting a job. Each job will run for 30 days, and all the payments are securely processed by PayPal. We guarantee that the whole process won’t take more than 5 minutes.
And there is more! We are going to give one uber cool Abduzeedo t-shirt to one lucky guy that posts a job during this month. So go ahead and lets flood our job board with great job opportunities for designers.
New Tutorials
We have posted tutorials weekly on Abduzeedo, and also opened the blog to guest tutorials like the Basic Animation in Photoshop and the Fireworks 101. So if you want to promote your tutorial on abduzeedo just send it to us via email.
We have new tutorials coming; tutorials from Pixelmator, Illustrator, Fireworks, GIMP, and Photoshop of course. So, stay tuned ;)
New Design
We have started working on a new design for the blog. There is so much content that we think we have to, somehow, find a way to get the right content in the right place.
As opposed to the other redesigns, we really want to hear from you for this new one. We would love to know your ideas and suggestions for the new design. Also, point out to us the good and bad things about the current design. That will prevent us from making the same mistakes again.
As you can see we really want to keep offering nice content and services to the design community, and your opinion and suggestions are really important to us.
Editor: David Parrott

August has come and gone, and it was a great month for the blog. We’d like to thank you all for visiting the site, and for sharing your thoughts and opinions with us on the articles we've published. It was, as Steve Jobs says, phenomenal. We can’t forget to thank our sponsors for the support. They've been great!
For September we have some exciting news. Actually we hope we will have tons of news, because now all Abduzeedo members can submit news and links to their blogs or the sites they like. Pretty much anything that is good for the design community. It's very easy, just go to http://abduzeedo.com/user_news/ and click on submit news. We think it’s another step towards the user generated content idea we have for Abduzeedo for the future, and we hope you like it.
Another thing we’d like to mention is the Abduzeedo Card Design Contest. It’s been already one week since we launched the contest and there are already really good contenders for the free cards. You can check out all the entries at http://www.flickr.com/groups/abduzeedo/pool/tags/uprintingcontest/ , and below we’ll list some cards ;). There’s one more week for you to participate, so what are you waiting for?
Also we’re working on other new features, so there’s more to come. About the tutorials, this month we'll have more Pixelmator, Photoshop, Fireworks, and GIMP tutorials. So once again, we’d like to hear from you. Send us suggestions for tutorials, articles, and designers to feature on Abduzeedo.

After almost two months of vacation, I'm back. Even though I was away I still kept working on personal and even some professional projects and blogging when I had free time.
These two months were incredible. I have to thank everybody who received me: Patricia and Amanda in North Carolina, Terry in NYC, and Chris and all CSNGlobal team in Jupiter, Florida. Also I had the opportunity to meet some friends and readers such as Tarek from Joomp, Andrea Martins, Francisco Gutierrez, Elena, Chris, Jeff...
Aside from all of that, I had a tutorial published in Digital Arts Magazine for their July issue, the Creating Fireballs and Explosions in Photoshop and I did my first magazine cover for a Brazilian magazine called Super Interessante. They saw one of Abduzeedo's tutorials and wanted to use it for the cover. Sweet :)
Anyway, I'm back now and I will try to keep up with the Photoshop tutorials, some new features for the blog and the Abduzeedo’s t-shirts from Spreadshirt.com. I'm really sorry if some of your emails went unanswered or if I took a while to respond.

After 2 excellent weeks in North Carolina, I’ve arrived in New York. It's the 4th time I've been here and it’s still awesome. Lots of people, I’m always walking around, most of the time lost, but it’s really cool. This time I’m staying with my aunt Terry in her super cool apartment. Thanks for having me.
I had the chance to meet an old friend that I’ve been talking to him via AIM for almost 2 years. Also tomorrow I will go to a place called Barcade, in Brooklyn, where I will meet two other readers and it would be awesome a meet up with more people. So if you are from NY and you like design, join us. We will get there 6:30pm ;)
Below there's more information, that Francisco sent me, about how to get there.
For all of those in NYC. Sorry this is short notice but we're meeting up at Barcade Thursday July 10th around 6:30pm. Figure it was a fitting place to meet. Hope you can make it!
Here's how to get there.
Barcade - www.barcadebrooklyn.com/
388 Union Ave.
You take the L train to Brooklyn and get out at the Lorimer Stop.
Exit the train station at the Union & Metropolitan exit. (when you step off the train go to your right)
Go to the street and walk south on Union Ave and look for the address 388 Union Ave. You can't miss, it's on your left.
Here's a Google Maps link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=388+Union+Ave+Brooklyn…
Some pictures

It’s going to be a week since I arrived in the US. I’m still getting used to my new routine and trying to keep up the with updates and new blog features. However I’ve been experiencing a new culture that is totally different from mine.
I’m now in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and probably on July 8th I will be arriving in NYC where I will spend a few days. After that I will head to California: San Diego and LA. Maybe I will visit San Francisco as well.
Smokestack, fatback, many miles of railroad track
All night radio, keep on runnin' through your rock 'n' roll soul
All night diners keep you awake, hey, on black coffee and a hard roll
You might have to walk the fine line, you might take the hard line
But everybody's working overtime - James Brown, Living in America
Meanwhile I have written some Photoshop Tutorials and I’ve been playing around with my G9 camera, learning how to use it. I will post photos from the places I visit here on the blog, and if there is anyone from these cities that want to meet up for a coffee or something, let me know. Tips are welcome as well.

I know we had just recently released a new design a few months ago, but the blog has since grown much more than we had expected. Now we have more contributors (which is fantastic!), more posts each day, and much more content in the whole site. And that’s why we had to update the site.
The new design, however, is not much different from the previous one. We just changed some areas we thought had problems like the footer. There is more content shown in that area now. We also removed the stars and reduced the headers height.
There are also some new features. One of them is the “abduct this post” allowing registered users to bookmark pages they like. Through this new feature we have now made it easier for you to find a tutorial or interview you saw and liked a long time ago.
Besides that, everybody can now register to the site. By doing this you will have a profile page where you can edit and use html code to even create a mini portfolio. You’ll also have your own “abducted” page where it’ll show all the pages you have abducted.
We are still working on these new features, and others. Our idea is to allow users to contribute more to the site, and even write articles. Because of that, now every contributor will have an area of 640x90 pixels in their posts. They will be able to sell that area, place banners, or even Google AdSense. Let us know if you want to be a contributor so we will provide you an account for that.
I hope you like the new design and feel free to send us suggestions and critics. All feedback is very welcome, we’d love to hear from you.